Albert Einstein Quote on Capitalism

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

Wake Up Sheeple!

Here is the simple formula:

Use lowered profits as an excuse to lay off a few people. Remind daily the remaining workers that they are lucky to still have a job. Remind them that 'things are rough out there.'

Continue to use lowered profits (a simple threat of just being in business...almost every business deals with lowered profits at some point) to take away health care benefits and cut back on retirement programs: "Things are tough. If we want to stay in business, we're going to have to cut back." ...the 'we' that is cutting back is, of course, you...the worker.

Remind the workers that with less employees, people are going to have to work twice as hard if they want to see the profits get back up where there pay freeze is lifted. Also, you cannot take vacation right now because there aren't enough employees to make up for the two jobs that you're working.

If you're brave, go for pay cuts across the board. Remind the workers than it's better than 'nothing at all. You're still very lucky to have a job in 'this economic environment.' Now is a good time to remind workers how many people are losing their homes and investments right now. They sure are lucky.

After you've cut back every conceivable program that helps the worker or helps to increase his/her wages/benefits, watch the corporate profits rise. And not just rise, but rise to record levels.

Maintain current crew that was cut back dramatically, keep the pay freeze, keep the cut wages make sure people are doing twice the work for less pay and less benefits.

Bottom line: record profits.

How do people not realize this is exactly what happened in most American businesses? They're still working and paying like the recession is still in full ring, yet they're pulling in more profits than ever before.

WHY? Because the workers took the hit. Like they always do. They got shat on and continued to show up at work every morning, talking about how goddamn lucky they were to not be on the layoff list. SO LUCKY! Lucky you. You get to do the jobs of your laid of co-workers, work much more than usual and get compensated much, much less. BUT THE PROFITS ARE UP. Your amazing job is SECURE. For now.

And that's how it's done. Yes, the part-time issue is a big one but it gets thrown into this cycle and approach by business. They know exactly what they're doing and they're laughing all the way to the bank while most working class can still barely keep their heads above water.

And I have a secret for you. PSST...listen up. Wages are like POWER. Those in charge very often take it *but they never, ever give it back.

That's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Take the Patriot Act for example. During that time when (according to Bush) everyone wanted to kill us because they hated our 'freedoms,' they felt it was appropriate to pass a shit load new laws that restricted your freedom (I suppose) in order to give the terrorists what they wanted: A country with less freedom (again, according to Bush and Co.)

After Bin Laden was killed and things simmered down, the NHS and homeland security was fattened up, they never gave back the rights you used to have. And they never will. Because if you look at the history of government, they take rights away. They pass more laws..think of it as a linear path that moves forward with time. As time goes on, so do restrictions on liberty and freedom.

And that's what businesses do (at least larger corporations) as you give up things like health benefits and retirement benefits and accept lower wages and less security, those are things that are gone for good. Because I can only think of a handful of companies that have ever willingly given up anything to employees.

What is the answer? In a word: Unions.

Period. Organization and solidarity will change things if Americans have the brains and balls to embrace standing up together and saying 'no' for a change instead of constantly saying 'yes' and acting like they have battered woman syndrome. Or maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome where the captive starts to have feelings for the captor.

Either way, things have to change and they have to change soon.

Even if everything changed tomorrow and the minimum wage went up and that created a ripple effect that caused everyone's salaries and wages to go up, they started to invest in more health care benefits, offered you some more vacation time or sick days...these are entities that still went 30 years fattening their wallets and profits on your backs.

A lot of the larger employers (McDonald's, Walmart, AT&T) they have amassed enough profits in that time of wringing out workers that they'll never be hurt. Ever. The Walton family has more wealth than the entire lower 40% of Americans combined and yet they still won't offer basic human kindness to their employees. They're treated like a necessary evil and they're treated like burdens most of the time.

And yet, the truth is that if you work at Walmart or McDonald's and someone tries to convince you that your job isn't important, rest assured that you would NOT be in that store if your presence wasn't completely necessary. You are an important part of the company regardless of how belittled your job is or you have been on the job. They would cut your position in a second without any thought if they thought they could keep running without you. That's what they do: eliminate every single unnecessary position (without regard to customers, employers, etc) that they can possibly still operate with.

Time to stand up. Time for some strength, some wisdom, some courage and time for people to get informed. Time for solidarity and unions...they are the only way. If you're opposed to those things, I'm guessing it's because you've never studied unions are unaware that they created the middle class (which was why the United States was such an envy of other nations for 30 years).

If you're opposed to the idea of unionization, then get comfortable. Your post in life will never change, your life will always be a struggle to keep your head above water and you will most definitely never be able to retire. Not when you're 65, not when you're 75, not when you're 90. You will never save enough wealth to be able to not work.

And that's bullshit. You sell your most precious resource (your time and your health) for pennies on the dollar and you'll never be able to enjoy the fruits of all that constant work. Meanwhile, the higher ups at the companies will amass enough money and assets to last them for 20 lifetimes and then some.

America isn't a fair nation anymore and the corporations are running the government and your interests and your family's interests are the last thing they have in mind.

PROFITS OVER PEOPLE in the new America. You are, officially, worth more dead than you are alive, sadly. And what kind of fucking country gets behind that idea? Not to mention this idea that health care should be a luxury that only the rich should be able to obtain.

If you work full time in any capacity, by God, you fucking deserve to be able to go to the hospital without the threat of bankruptcy if you get sick. You should be able to end up in a car accident without losing your goddamn house in the process.

Wake up. This is your lives and your children's lives and well being we're talking about. Can you not see how much you've been fleeced and how much has been taken of you, constantly asked of you while the ultra wealthy and corporations always make sure that you and your family take the hit when things go bad? And when things go well, you never get to partake in any of the success unless you're a stockholder and that's a position that very few American workers are a part of.

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The Sociopathy of Capitalism

Allow me to introduct the concept of ponerology.

This is the idea that a power structure, over time, becomes twisted by the work of relatively few sociopaths until the entire structure and everyone in it behaves and thinks like a sociopath as well.

The idea that profit is the only thing that matters, that employees must be paid as little as possible, is a purely pathological judgement.

Pathological in this context means a decision that is overtly made on 'rational' grounds only. Much like the Randian philosophy of objectivism. Having a perfection definition of 'pathological' isn't necessary to recognize what's wrong.

A pathological person will think any action is logical if they get an immediate benefit. The consequences for others are irrelevant and so are the long-term costs. They are someone else's problem.

The current culture of finance and business is exactly this. The system itself has become pathological as a result of years of sociopaths wielding great power. Now, even a decent, humane person, once they get sucked into the corporate world, will find themselves making utterly pathological decisions and being congratulated for it by other decent, humane people.

These people are not sociopaths, but our culture has reached the point where it's internalised the idea that you have to behave like a sociopath to achieve anything.

Recovering the system from this point is a long and difficult process, and right now there's nobody even willing to say there's a problem.

Which is pathological in itself.

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Capitalism and Opportunity

The difference is, nobody is exerting power over anybody else in a consensual sexual experience.

When you have a finite amount of resources and they're all privately owned, the wealthy begin to incur natural advantages (at its most basic; "economies of scale"). Those with money have much more freedom than those without; that includes freedom to make money. If there are one hundred people under capitalism, the one with the most amount of money is going to come out on top so long as he doesn't do anything stupid. When everything has a dollar value, those with more dollars are able to take more opportunities for themselves than those with no dollars. Because this includes opportunities to make more dollars, the process is a type of positive feedback loop. Wealth continues to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands and inequality gets worse. This, too, is a positive feedback loop. As inequality worsens, the laboring class becomes more and more desperate and are more and more at the mercy of the capitalist class just to find a way to procure bread and a shirt and a roof.

It's like picturing economies of scale for a business... except for an individual person. Oh... you have enough money to make a downpayment on a house? Now your monthly expenses are cheaper and you get to save some of your house payment as equity in your home. Don't have money? Pay out the ass to a landlord and accept that in this economy, you'll probably never be capable of saving up enough for a downpayment.

Have money? Go see the doctor when your insides are hurting you and straighten everything out right away.

Don't have money? Hope it goes away, and if it sticks around for several months, maybe try and pinch on the groceries for a month to save up enough to ask a doctor a few questions and then get a bill for an unknown amount sent to you in the mail at an unknown point in the future when you hope no other emergencies have arisen to clear the little bit of a rainy day fund you have.

Have money? Pay for your child's education so they can focus on their studies completely, perform well in school, and land one of the few good jobs.

Don't have money? Tell your kid to go terribly into debt and to work his ass off while also trying to do his best to attend to his studies. Tell your kid it's okay and that he tried his hardest when one of the privileged children who never had to work a day in their lives graduates with honors and gets that cushy job and your kid graduates with an acceptable GPA, thousands of hours flushed down some shitty wage job, and an assload of debt left on top of him, which severely limits his options for the future and leads him in his desperation to start serving tables at a restaurant because there is nothing more productive for society that he could be doing, since the ONLY way anything gets done under capitalism is if a wealthy person stands to make a good amount of money off of others by doing it.

The women that manufactured the clothes you're probably wearing right now live like slaves. Cramming into garment factories for long days and grueling hours, and in many places for less than $100/month. That isn't freedom. That isn't anything but exploitation rooted in prior exploitation. That is what the natural coercion of market forces has done to her.

Being forced to sell your time, energies, and (in a service job) yourself for barely enough to scrape by while the man who owns your time, energies, and yourself makes much more off of you than what he pays you isn't like a consensual sexual relationship between equal partners. If you want to use a parallel, it's like being forced into prostitution.

A further note on the positive feedback loop nature of capitalism: How is it possible for a human being born into this society to make money to try and escape that trap?

A] Work for wages -- which means do labor that has some level of value, and then have your boss take as much of that value for himself as he can get away with based on how desperate the other possible laborers in the economy are at present. It is fundamentally impossible for one laborer to move up in the economic food chain without further enriching a very wealthy individual already ahead of him.

B] Have a great idea and want to start your own company? Great! Go take out a massive loan from a bank and whether you succeed or fail, pay the bank more money than they gave you. You cannot create wealth for yourself without necessarily paying a portion of it up the ladder. Thus, social mobility for a few of the many poor entails further enrichment of the few wealthy, which means a smaller proportion remaining for the rest of the impoverished. The growth of inequality is absolutely inevitable (when it gets so bad we're forced to either intervene or simply let the wealthy come in like vultures and pick everything off the desperate workers at discounted prices during the recession).

What happens when you mix the necessity of property ownership in? What does a man do who is born into this society? He needs access to land in order to provide for himself -- either by growing food, building a shelter, or having a space to perform some skill/trade/craft. What happens when all of that land has already been stolen from those who originally used it and dwelt upon it and scooped up by the Boomers and those who came before them?

The poor in this country are fucked. The young in this country are poor. The assets of this country are firmly in the hands of the older and wealthier generations who got theirs when America had access to half the world's resources and then kicked out the ladder from beneath them, began privatizing everything, and began pumping out all of this neo-liberalism horseshit about "free markets."

Pro-tip: America likes free markets because America has the most money and influence, which means in any "free" trade, America is going to come out on top. That's how the coercive power of money works. If you have a lot and other people don't, but they desperately need it to survive, grow, and thrive, then they are going to be in a position where they are willing to work for much less or pay much higher prices, simply because they are desperate.

Adam Smith outlined this clearly; while two nations can each trade in their comparative advantage to their mutual benefit (i.e. one is better at making textiles, one is better at making wine), if one nation is better at making both textiles and wine, then the other nation can do nothing to compete. The only thing it can do is be exploited. Especially if we can cheaply pay to transport goods across the world so that we can abuse perpetually existing desperate pockets of the globe by forcing them to "compete" the only way they can: BY BEING WILLING TO WORK FOR SLAVE WAGES. This willingness then deflates the cost of their labor, even though the value of the labor is identical to what it would have been if the factories were located somewhere where the human beings doing the labor were required to be paid human living wages rather than treated like animals in cages.

From this place of exploitation, the nations become trapped. Workers in places like Cambodia can protest their >$100/month pay [EDIT: LESS THAN $100 PAY] and ask for an extra $14 and then be harassed by the state for going on strike and have a company like Nike (which profits immensely off the exploitation of these women) simply wash their hands of the blood and say, "Sorry; we don't set the prices, that's the job of the factory owner." As though the supply chain isn't one, continuous process that Nike is actively benefiting from. The factory owner is caught in the middle. The major corporations and banks, posting massive profits, are the ones who ultimately have all of the "slack" in the system. That's the only node in the chain where anybody has true "freedom" to do as they choose, and they wash their hands, go on luxury vacations, live sinfully wealthy lives, and stomp their boots in the faces of the slaves that made them, all while boldly declaring that they are improving the quality of those slave's lives, because the slaves "voluntarily" chose to enter the garment factory and work for whatever impossibly small rate "market forces" have decided the factory owner is required to let her keep.

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How America Subverted te Meaning of a College Education

America's history with education is odd. Mind you - for my perspective to fully make sense - I'll be linking articles. They're sort-of long, but I ask those interested in my response to read them.

While I'm going to be talking mostly about college, I'd implore you to read this article from the Atlantic, What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finald's School Success, but more over...

Education's sole purpose is not "to get a job". Or at least, this has not historically been the case. It has been the intent to educate people - and "education" and what's applicable to the corporate world are not always the same thing.

Valuable knowledge and the ability to understand art, philosophy, social sciences - this shapes thought, this thought shapes society, it shapes our ethics, or actions as citizen, these are things that can empower future leaders to be citizens that can see a bigger picture. These are subjects that give our work meaning and put our work in perspective. It's not what to think that's only important, it's not just a set of skills to do a job that are needed. It's knowing how to think that shapes the course of our society.

The problem with turning education merely into something that people consider directly "useful" is that you create a nation of people who do complex tasks, but who do not question why they are doing them, who these tasks benefit, etc.

Education has turned into nothing more than mere vocational training. It is increasingly people paying for their own job training - something companies used to provide to their employees on their dollar. People through this system become people who toil and follow direction, people who accept a top-down culture (increasingly shaped by corporations) without any kind of rebellion.

And you can see it's effects in youth culture - as the hippies turned to punks, punk grew to grunge and hip hop and rave culture and now you just have this cannibalistic hipster culture that cannibalizes itself. But look at the ethics about the establishment - every passing generation is more accepting than the last, every next generation defines its culture as consumer culture more than the last.

Now - even by the so called rebellious underground cultures - you're considered lame to be protesting "the man" or consumer/corporate culture. And I think, in part, this has to do with america getting away from having respect for thinkers. If you get anything from all I blab about and link to here, get this: Information is not the same as knowledge - and our education system is geared more and more towards information.

But look where we're at today. We (IMO) have too many people going to college, too many people being charged too much to go to college and then essentially become indentured servants for years after education (if they can get a job), and the quality of said education is going down as education is more likely to be vocational training for jobs and not actual education.

But a little history is needed to look at the big picture. At the end of the civil rights era it became illegal to not employ racial minorities from jobs and work places. At the time most companies both did not require you to have a college degree to perform a job, because, like today, college degrees say nothing about whether you can or cannot perform said job.

Look at modern jobs: HR assistants, administrative assistants, call centers, entry level IT workers, some rudimentary sales jobs, entry level graphic design jobs - these don't require college degrees as a means to prove you can do it but it's a prerequisite to being hired.

What is needed is job training. Job training has been slowly externalized - whether by intent or unintentional consequence is beyond me, but why?

Employers started requiring college degrees for simple jobs because it was an economic barrier to keep blacks out. This was largely off the books, unspoken and off the record and hard to substantiate. I used to have several links backing this up and have not been able to find them for some time. If anyone else can find anything backing this up i'd be glad to see it - but until then I suppose you can take my [citation needed] with a grain of salt.

This requirement for college degrees changed the national discussion about education and a number of government programs were eventually started to assist people to obtain college education.

As more people started getting college education, what education gave people started to change, away from something that leaned more towards hard academics and more towards "job training". As this occurred you started to see companies do away with their "on the job training". Because, by happenstance, the process and the expense was now externalized onto the citizen.

In the last 15+ years we've seen a boom in vocational accredited "universities" that are nothing short of diploma factories. These schools are expensive, they have no requirements for attendance really - your high-school GPA, your SAT scores, your ACT scores - none of that matters. But we're all told we need college degrees to get jobs, the government is willing to subsidize part of it, and people are free to sign their name on endless dotted lines.

These schools are the epitome of vocational training, but somehow they're accredited as if they're Clemson or Duke or Radford even. Academic courses are made to be blown through. Fake statistics are given from the schools like "95% of our graduates get jobs in their chosen fields" and they fail to mention to you that if you chose to work flipping burgers, well then you got a job in your chosen field. Devry, Strayer, University of Pheonix, South University, and hundreds more. PBS/Frontline did a good documentary on all this called College, Inc.. There's a small article covering it here.

But that documentary talks about the for-profits chains and online schools and other diploma factories. What about the actual colleges out there? They too have been corporatized and trivialized. You can start to look at this at this blog, How the American University was killed in 5 steps. The short of it covers the defunding of public higher education, the demoralization and impoverishment of professors, the dominance of an managerial and administrative class within the university system, and the insertion of corporate culture and money into the university system. I recommend reading the link.

On top of that, student life has been trivialized by a multi-billion dollar sports industry and the thought that Greek life and college life are one in the same. School, as it becomes a vocational training facility - has also become a means to entertain middle class and rich kids. Chris Hedges again, talks about this in the Perversion of Scholarship.

And when all is said and done this has profound impact on culture. We no longer respect thinkers. We mock English majors, we make fun of philosophers. STEM graduates sit around self assured of our own awesomeness constantly mocking art majors by posing the statement that they're degree means nothing more than a future of asking "Do you want fries with that?"

Do not get me wrong, there is a contradiction in our society - we need more STEM majors to be competitive - but we also need to find a respect of thinkers and these things do not have to be at odds with each other.

In America nothing is more important than making a buck. Never mind the fact that the educational world has been changed into mere vocational training and making us all into indentured wage slaves, because mere job training has been externalized into the regular citizen taking out loans. And why? It all started with rich white businessmen trying to keep blacks out by making it about "qualifications" rather than race.

Even today, the EEOC states that companies of certain sizes must employ a certain percentage of minorities based on the population demographics of the location of the companies. So the companies move further away high minority areas, or they staff minorities in low rung jobs. Anything higher than entry level IT, sales, managerial spots, etc. are still greatly white.

Companies do a little dance, and sometimes even opt to take on the EEOC fines rather than attempt to meet the reasonable quotas set unto them. Meanwhile, a portion of white people are convinced that affirmative action still means they have the short end of the stick now. Tell that to all the black males who got hit much harder - percentage wise - than any other demographic during the recession. But that's another topic.

I suppose my point is this nation doesn't respect thinkers. We only see education as a tool used for job employment. Because we're 'Murica. And nothing is more important than money and buying shit.

In Europe there are fewer college grads, but I find the American dream more alive there than here. A picture was posted the other day of a man who came from a family of janitors. He was the first in his family to go to college. He said he was proof the American dream was still alive.

In most European nations you don't have DeVrys. College isn't some drunken beer fest and endless sporting event to spectate. If you have good grades the state will pay for you to go to school. All you need is good grades in most nations. That's it. And for the most part the corporate world stays out of it.

Even in our "higher academic" realms where education in the sciences are still going strong, schools are selling off the results of studies, patents on inventions that were done by the labor of kids who are paying to attend the school to the highest bidder, so these things can be locked away by some corporation and IP law.

The school system in this nation has been made to serve the interests of business first and foremost and almost exclusively. And the american people can't wait for it to do so even more. They are salivating to kick the shit out of those "faggot" art majors, those "sissy" English majors, those "useless" philosophers, or theoretical scientists even. Because they have the limited vision to see what these people can offer society.

And as we become a nation obsessed with vocation as a means to endless consumption, we find ourselves in a race to the bottom as corporations decide that regardless of how large our loans are (which are nothing more than externalized job training we paid for ourselves) we're too expensive. And now we're meant to compete at the scab wages of nations that haven't figured out that kissing in public isn't a travesty worthy of a stoning.

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Big Business and the Death of Mom and Pop Shops

It's like over-fishing. If we all agreed to fish less, fish populations wouldn't be dwindling, and we'd all be better off.

But no individual has any incentive to fish less.

If I go out in my boat, I am not personally going to make any significant difference in the fish population, so I ought to just fish as much as I can. However, that doesn't mean I don't think it's worth it to preserve the fish population. It's just that my individual action doesn't matter. What needs to happen, for everyone's benefit, is that all parties involved make a collective agreement.

It's the same with the mom and pop shops. I would much much much rather live in a world dominated by small businesses, but I can't save the small stores by my individual action. I'm only hurting myself.

Government action is needed, and not just because mom and pop stores are charming or whatever. In a world dominated by big business, innovation is discouraged, and slavery is created. That sounds pretty strong, so let me explain: Big businesses make it so 95 percent of the population has almost zero chance of ever being able to work for themselves, or even make a decent wage, no matter their talent or abilities.

Let's say Jeff is from a poor family, but is especially talented. He creates a way to make the best tasting tasting in the world without having to use any special or overly expensive ingredients. So he decides to try to start a business using that talent.

In order to start his business, Jeff needs start-up cash. He has to find someone who will get him a loan. Imagine you're a bank, and some random nobody with no collateral asks for a meeting and tells you his coffee is the best and he wants to start a business. Yep, it goes just like you imagine.

But let's assume Jeff gets lucky and gets a loan. He starts his business and finds that even though he uses the same ingredients, the same equipment, and the same materials as Starbucks, he pays a lot more for it than Starbucks does.

Why?

Becasue Starbucks is huge. They buy in bulk and push suppliers around. For this reason, even though Jeff's business is every bit as efficient as Starbucks, his coffee costs a dollar more per cup, making it difficult to compete.

The same thing happens in any business. The very fact that the business is big makes it a better competitor. This means that anyone who wants to start their own business is at a disadvantage, regardless of their intelligence or ability. So, Jeff is probably out of luck.

But, continuing the story, let's assume enough people are willing to overlook his higher cost, and Jeff's coffee shop starts taking business away from the local Starbucks. Even with added costs, people prefer Jeff's coffee and are willing to pay for it.

Well, Starbucks has billions of dollars. They don't need all their stores to be profitable, so they can use those billions of dollars to have promotions in that town, just to crush Jeff. They can make it so someone sees a Starbucks advertisement on every other billboard. If Jeff's coffee is really the best in the world, they can just build a new store right next to Jeff's store, so everyone who would buy Jeff's product passes Starbucks first. This kills Jeff. Even though he ran his business better, the very fact that his bank account was smaller means that he can't be successful. Starbucks gets to retain a near monopoly, just because they started off with more money.

You might say that all or at least some of this is a good thing. After all, if Starbucks's bargaining power lets them sell coffee cheaper, isn't that a good thing? Maybe all the people who want to have a coffee shop are out of luck, but the rest of us save some money, so it's alright.

Well, that works until you realize the same kind of thing happens across almost any industry. So you save a few cents on bread, on muffins, on electronics, on coffee, on clothes, on entertainment, on everything.

The flip side is that you're unable to be self-employed. So even though "efficiency" has saved you a few bucks, the vast majority of the money saved turns into profits for the super rich while you, and 95 percent of the country, have lost so much income that the benefits don't come close to outweighing your losses. That's how we got in the situation where the average worker produces five times as much, but makes the same as they did fifty years ago.

This also lowers the wages for everyone, even people who don't own their own businesses. In a world like ours, dominated by titans and chains, no one can say "Business X, I don't like that you keep the vast majority of your profits and pay your workers shit. I'm going to start my own business and compete with you. Instead of four yachts, I'll only have one, but my employees will be happier and healthier, and all your best employees are going to come to me, so I'll be more competitive".

In theory, this is how things should work. But, as mentioned above, the size and bankroll of business X means that the little guy can't try that. If he wants to eat, he will have to become a wage slave and let some one else take 90 percent of the value created by his work. His abilities don't matter and his talents won't matter. The lion's share of all the value he creates will go to the person who happened to start with the most money, just because that person started with more money.

Now, I'm all for unbridled capitalism IF everyone starts on an even playing field. For the first generation, capitalism is great. After that, it's slavery.

It takes a truckload of money to start even a small business, about 2-3 years' full-time salary as a bare minimum. It's out of reach of the vast majority of people. It's mostly people with personal connections or wealthy relatives that manage to start businesses. The true rags to riches are really rare. They exist, but they're a fraction of a fraction. Most successful business owners started with a lot of help from people close to them.

Try to $50,000 - 75,000 with the understanding that this would be barely enough to start a business. It's an uphill battle with a steep incline.

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